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According to Texas lore, the reason Dallas has one of the nation's busiest airports is that outbound jets are loaded with Texas businessmen heading for Wall Street to borrow money. The two most notable jet passengers from Dallas to New York last week—flying on separate planes to increase the odds that at least one of them would survive the trip—were bound on a different mission. John Dabney Murchison, 39, and his brother Clinton Williams Murchison Jr., 37, flew to Manhattan not as suppliants but as conquerors. In a coup that outdealt even the feats of their wheeler-dealer father, oil-rich Clint Murchison Sr. (TIME cover, May 24, 1954), the Murchison brothers of Texas had won, almost in spite of themselves, a commanding position in the very citadel of U.S. finance.
They did it by taking control of Alleghany Corp., the vast Manhattan holding company whose direct assets ($122 million) by no means reflect the power it exercises over the U.S. economy. Besides having a controlling interest in the New York Central and substantial chunks of the Baltimore & Ohio and Missouri Pacific railroads, Alleghany controls Minneapolis' Investors Diversified Services, a $3.4 billion investment giant that includes the world's largest mutual fund. In the biggest and bitterest proxy fight in U.S. history, the Murchisons snatched Alleghany out of the hands of Woolworth Heir Allan P. Kirby, 68, a Wall Street titan with a fortune far bigger than theirs. More impressive yet, they won by rallying more Wall Street support than Kirby himself. "All of us here in Texas were pulling for them," says Dallas Insurance Millionaire Jimmy Collins. "We like big deals in Texas, and this is the biggest kind you can make. We admire it because the Murchisons won it the hard way—on the home grounds of the other guy."
The Bird Dogs. The Murchisons' victory on Allan Kirby's home grounds was dramatic notice of the changing role of Texas in the U.S. economy. Easterners still like to think of Texans as illiterate oil millionaires who wear ten-gallon hats—and, when they are in Wall Street looking for money, some Texans shrewdly play the expected part. Says Dallas Millionaire Trammell Crow: "I know I can get in to see people in New York more easily because it says I'm from Texas on my business card. They want to see what a Texan looks like." But at home in Dallas or Houston, today's Texas tycoon is more apt to wear a Brooks Brothers suit than Texas boots; though his poke may have started in oil (and gained by the 27½% depletion allowance), much of it now comes from electronics, real estate, insurance or shipping. And for the new Texan, Texas is no longer big enough. Ranging across the nation like eager bird dogs, Texas businessmen are supplying capital, entrepreneurial vigor and acumen in nearly every area of the U.S. economy.